As part of its work creating a safer and sounder financial system and preventing a future crisis, the European Commission has proposed today to amend existing European rules on the supervision of financial conglomerates. Financial conglomerates are financial groups that are usually active in more than one country and operate in both the insurance and banking businesses. Drawing lessons from the financial crisis, the Commission proposes to equip national financial supervisors with new powers to better oversee the conglomerates' parent entities, such as holding companies. This would allow supervisors to apply banking supervision, insurance supervision and supplementary supervision at the same time, thereby remedying to unintended loopholes identified in the context of the financial crisis. In this way, supervisors should be able to get better information at an earlier stage should a financial conglomerate run into trouble and be better equipped to intervene. The proposal now passes to Member States and the European Parliament for consideration. More information: http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/financial-conglomerates/supervision_en.htm